The art of analyzing mobile user statistics

Ever wondered how much log is generated at the mobile ad networs end if you had an app with 100K page views daily? Its about two pages of a typical novel for every ad request. Thats about 200K pages/day. The log data is meant to be useful to all the stakeholders involved in the mobile ad ecosystem. Out of this entire corpus of data, about 10% could be useful to the app developers, which is 20K pages /day. Sounds overwhelming, isn’t it?

Well, the data in its original form may not be useful to get what you want. You may have to dedicate an entire human resource to simply watch this set of characters scrolling down in green to find any recognizable patterns like in the movie Matrix. There is sincere effort from everybody in the mobile ad ecosystem to make this data useful to you. It has to be filtered, cleaned, sorted and then presented to you in a understandable form. To make this possible, complex databases designs are being introduced, new algorithms are evolving, interpretable user interfaces being developed and training materials are continuously being created to overcome the challenges faced by app/wap site builders/owners .

But, the point is even if 1% of this data in structured form which I call as statistics is available to you, will you make use of it???

Why app developers/wap site owners may need such data ?
As an app developer or a wap site owner you typically need key statistics to help you grow traffic, engagement and optimize revenue. Some of these metrics are:

Users

New users

Retain users

Revenue

From ads

From paid apps and in-app purchases

From subscription

Increase time spent on the site

In reality, its hard to expect any productive outcome from your efforts without looking at above statistics.

What kind of data is available?
Every ad requests sent by app developers/wap site owners contain some important information which it used by ad networks like us to deliver a suitable ad.

Amount of information available from an ad request and captured by ad server could be humungous. It is typically a combination of default information shared by your hosting server and the additional parameters you choose to pass on. Together the information captured could provide us an valuable insights into user profiles, their browsing behaviour and the technology of the device they use.

To begin with, we, at AdIQuity, wore your hat and identified some important data that you could use. We then provided you access to few important segmentation reports in your dashboard that are often overlooked or not well understood. Here is an attempt to share the kind of reports we have and their usage.

1. Platform report
For wap site developers, knowing whether your users use Android or iOS or other operating systems during wap browsing will be of good value while designing the user-interface of your wap site. Often ad campaigns rate vary for the different platforms. You can promote your wap sites to lure more users of the highly paid platform to access the wap site. If you have an wap site and planning on your next app, this report will give you a good direction for your efforts.

2. Handset Identification
The user-agent information passed on to us along with multiple handset manufacturer databases will help us decode the device and model that your users use. You will realize the percentage of users who will be able to seamlessly use your app/wap site. These days, there is a larger population of users using smart-phones capable of rendering high quality graphics and high paying ads. Failing to study the user handset stats, might result in games developer providing poor user-experiences compared to their competition. And news sites may use Java script ad codes capable of being rendered only on smart-phones whereas, typically 20% of the users who still use feature-phones may not see the ads resulting in potential revenue losses.

3. Carrier Identification
A lot of ad campaigns that ad networks receive show preferences for certain carriers used by the app/wap users. To show those high paying ads on your app/wap site, you may have to understand your users and promote your apps on those high paying and preferred campaigns.

All the above reports (platform, handset and carrier) are currently available on your dashboard for all the mobile sites and app developers.

All the raw data don’t magically appear by the wave of a magic wand. They are gathered from various sources and with the co-operation of all the stakeholders on this eco-system, the advertisers, third party vendors, ad networks and app/wap site developers like you.

The more raw information is available to us, the more sophisticated report we can share with you. You can help us in coming up with sophisticated reports by passing on small details which you have access to like the demographic profile and real-time location information. Our api’s and sdk’s provide easy means of passing on such information to us. There are off-course, various challenges faced in recording such information from the users. With better app and wap user interfaces, many developers are successful in collecting such information from the mobile users and passing it to us. There could always be more data which can be passed but, may give rise to privacy concerns. Such data can definitely be avoided until the establishment of secure privacy laws.

Apart from providing a structure to the raw data and presenting it in a human readable form capable of deriving insights, Adiquity is gradually moving towards providing contextual based ads to your users.

If you have any feedback, question or concern about this blog feel free to send an email to Amarnath@Adiquity.com

Recent Post

Company

AdIQuity is a state of the art Mobile Ads optimization platform that generates high monetary returns for publishers through real time optimization applied on global ad inventory sourced from leading ad network partners.
more »